The suit accuses the Utah-based Ancestry.com of infringing its patent since 2013 by selling AncestryDNA kits that identify a person’s relatives who share parts of their DNA. 23andMe also claims that Ancestry.com has been misleading customers by running a “perpetual sale” and by falsely claiming in ads that it tests five times more regions than its rivals.

“Defendants’ repeated pattern of false and misleading advertising has caused, and will continue to cause irreparable injury to 23andMe’s reputation, goodwill and business, if not enjoined,” the suit says.

The complete article with all the details may be found at: http://bit.ly/2IeBKZV. To read the entire article, you must register on the site and provide your name and email address. However, registration is free and will provide seven days’ access to the articles on the site.

I’ve long thought that Ancestry’s claims were not entirely accurate. As I have ALWAYS thought that 23andme had a test that was more comprehensive and thorough than Ancestry. 23andme just has a better procedure and just plain better results. I trust them more and therefore recommend them to everyone who asks. Period.

If all you want is ethnicity and health reports, 23andme is probably your top choice. But the problem for anyone who is primarily interested in finding matches to confirm their genealogical research is that 23and me has not got many users to match against, when compared with the other testing companies. Ancestry’s database is far and away the largest, and the only way to get access to it is to test at Ancestry, because they don’t accept transfers.

P.S.: The above post shouldn’t be taken as a rave review for Ancestry. There’s a lot about their offering that I don’t like, such as the fact that they do not have a chromosome browser or a decent search engine to help you pore throught your match list.

Most of their customers seem to have posted either minimal trees of less than 50 people, or else no tree at all, and other trees are locked.

Even when one of your matches has posted a tree, you aren’t allowed to see what it contains unless, after having paid for the test and gotten your results, you then pay extra to take out a subscription to the full Ancestry site as well (a fact which is not readily apparent from their glossy advertising).

Unfortunately, the sad fact remains that it’s pretty hard to catch a fish unless you’re fishing where the fish are and, at the moment, Ancestry has the biggest school of fish.

All the DNA sites offer the same basic information. They differ in how much you want to pay for They all accept each others results.
23andme has been in trouble with the Feds oven there health claims..
Maybe they see this as a way to make up for their loses.

Ancestry won’t accept results from other companies. MyHeritage does accept from Ancestry and 23andMe. As for LivingDNA, MyHeritage haven’t announced if they accept or not.
Still disappointed with 23andMe for not having Trees to match to their DNA matches. This is what I need to check against the matches.

Glenn – every single statement you have made is false! You are woefully misinformed. The only possible partial exception would be a gaff by 24andme early on (years ago) in which 23 was doing health reports without the governments PERMISSION – they have since gained that PERMISSION – and have resumed doing health reports. Please do your research before spreading false information.

My gmail & yahoo email accounts do not work on this site either. Since I am now retired, my professional account is unavailable. I see 23&Me as a general health service, not particularly for genealogy. I also see that Promethease may be getting some of 23’s business.

Boo Hoo for 23 and Me…..I recently got my DNA results back from Ancestry and was very pleased, it not only showed where the Ancestors were from but also showed them coming from Western Europe and the British Isles into New England and on into New York, settling up the Hudson River Valley and beyond.
Four of my 3rd cousins had their DNA’s done through Ancestry, plus my daughter, granddaughter and a 1st cousin….imagine that…we are all related.
As far as Health Issues, through my own research and the Death records that I have accumulated, I know the answers to that too. And certainly no one has complained about the DNA from MY Heritage which is good also.

It sounds to me like 23andMe has many accurate accusations.
According to ISOGG, 23andMe’s ethnic predictions are much better than those of Ancestry.https://isogg.org/wiki/Autosomal_DNA_testing_comparison_chart
Way too much of Ancestry’s information is based on people’s inaccurate family trees rather than any DNA evidence. People are jumping to many very incorrect conclusions based on the fluff that Ancestry is giving them.
I tell people I have NO provable matches on Ancestry. I have probable matches and possible matches but without basic tools, such as a chromosome browser, matches beyond 4th cousin are questionable at best. I use the matches from FTDNA, GEDmatch and MyHeritage and only use the Ancestry matches I can find on the other sites. I haven’t tested with 23andMe.

I have tested with 23 and Me, Ancestry, and FamilyTreeDNA. The ethnicity results vary slightly between them as each uses a different computation to calculate these values. I very seldom visit the 23 and Me site to review matches, because it is the most unfriendly of the sites with the least information to give regarding matches. I have wished at times that I had not spent my money on testing with them. They chose their format and their methodology. The tests are all similar. I see them crying foul because they don’t do the business Ancestry does. I am not sympathetic.

What you need to keep in mind is that without any factual comparison tools, Ancestry matches may or may not actually be showing you any common ancestors. Beyond 3rd cousin matches it gets increasingly iffy. You may well be jumping to some very wrong conclusions. 23and Me isn’t great, but at least they provide evaluation tools you can use.

W Davd Samuelsen, livingdna does accept transfers. Also you can have a tree at a number of websites and then link that tree at 23andme. It is actually better because then the tree is upto date instead of having a static tree.

I tried the approach “kring1bc” suggested (i.e. use the link and close the pop-up) but it didn’t work for me. I tried it with Chrome/Mozilla/IE. Thanks for the suggestion though. I love that type of work-around.

The majority of my Ancestry DNA matches do not have a family tree attached so I consider them a waste of time. I wish there was a way to filter only for those with a tree – even a very basic tree. I know you can contact all your matches through Ancestry but that doesn’t guarantee that they will respond.

I gave an Ancestry gift subscription for someone who was Asian American. It showed she was 49% eastern Asian, no breakdown between Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc,. We haven’t seen any improvement with this new ad campaign, but found a Chinese based site that analyzed her data for free.

Idrewitz,
you’re the one who is Misinformed! you need to know detail before spouting off. You are wrong on every account without question.. Facts that you apparently don’t know.
23andMe, 1st, they try to out do Ancestry with a gimmicky health report that is so general in nature so they don’t get into trouble with the FDA again! They were so greedy they couldn’t wait to get on the TODAY show to make claim that were absolutely misleading and just wrong!! So now the health report you get is honestly relatively useless and way too early in development and FDA criteria for specified testing… The FDA is not going to allow 23andMe to Freak people out. So t’s too General…. *(a lot of people have a twitch muscle for example.. big deal!) Its a gimmick for now largely..
2nd, 23andMe uses and inferior awkward device that is not efficient. Also the makers of that device falsely claimed for years it was an FDA approved device. Leading people and companies to assume it was FDA approved for any testing. The fact was It was only approved for one type of FDA approved test..
So 23andMe by association and by using this device misled the public and it customers greatly during that time. Not until recently have they been approved for a few, I’ll state it again.. a FEW more FDA test approvals for recognition.
3rd, Ancestry is and has a much, much larger data base for Ancestral research.. It’s not even close to be sure. Yes both need work for the Asian population. 23andMe may have a slight up on those.. But in time Ancestry will dominate that as well. There is a reason that Ancestry will soon be the largest Bio-Bank in the world.
Lastly, both companies do a fine job.. consumers should pick who they want. I think it is very unfortunate that 23andMe has made such a desperate move.. They won’t win.. they may only compromise both themselves and Ancestry.. If that happens, it’s the consumer who loses.

OMG Georgie. Do you have any experience AT ALL with 23andme? Well I do – and 27 immediate and extended family members and counting. How do I know so much? Because my father, daughter, and son all took the 23 and me test BEFORE the government said, “Hey, let’s see what you’ve got there.” (you and Glenn act like they were charged with a crime – they weren’t). I have been doing medical genealogy for YEARS and when my daughter, son and father got their tests back, guess what? It all meshed with my medical genealogy. You don’t know me, but please treat the people that post here with some respect – we all deserve it, Georgie

Just more in-fighting. Ancestry has been bilking the people of this country for many years. I began calling them “Incestry” before any of the companies even thought about doing DNA testing. The whole thing is a huge scam.

I intentionally tested with Ancestry because I didn’t want health information – I wanted genealogy matches! And boy did I get them, lots of known cousins and relatives plus ones I didn’t know about. I have since been in contact with long lost relatives from other branches of my tree. I’m very pleased with Ancestry DNA. Sounds like sour grapes from 23andMe. Boohoo.

A friend of mine was adopted as a baby and wanted to find her birth family. She tested with 23andMe and waited, and waited for any useful information & got none. I told her about Ancestry, she bought a kit and anxiously waited. Her closest match was a first cousin who introduced her to her half-sister & other relatives that she knew nothing about! They met this past Christmas for the first time and were thrilled with finding each other! 23andMe didn’t do that for them – Ancestry did.

Half my relatives on one side of the family have tested with Ancestry, the other half have tested with FTDNA, and never the twain shall meet. Both halves refuse to get involved with any company other than the one they tested with.

I don’t know….maybe they’re scared they won’t turn out to be related after all, but barring that, it sure would be helpful to get them all rounded up on the same platform so they could start separating out their maternal matches from their paternal ones. People — Gotta love ‘em. 🙂

He has been involved in genealogy for more than 35 years. He
has worked in the computer industry for more than 50 years in hardware,
software, and managerial positions. By the early 1970s, Dick was already
using a mainframe computer to enter his family data on punch cards. He
built his first home computer in 1980.